[gaius]

Sure you can. The Chinese are 10,000 miles away and don't really care about Western domestic politics. It might be different if you are an arms or pharma company, but for the average citizen concerned about civil liberties, you really can trust the Chinese in this case.

[adventured]

China cares a great deal about Western politics. Their two biggest markets are the United States and Europe.

Check out the Chinese support of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

There has been a ton of illegal Chinese money all over US elections for decades. Read up on the scandals from the 1990's revolving around this, or the Chinese money that flowed to Hillary in 2008.

Obama.com is (was?) even owned by a money bundler out of China.

Or check out the Chinese hackers that targeted the Romney & Obama campaigns.

http://www.latimes.com/la-na-donors19oct19-story.html#page=1

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/04/04/china.clin...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/08/the-illegal...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/10/hillary-clin...

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4264134/ns/nbc_nightly_news_with_b...

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/06/18807056-...

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/10/08/exposin...

[perlpimp]

It is not about you and the government, but rather about hackers that found out and are digging for these government approved exploits/backdoors/what-have-you.If they do alter piece by piece different bit of hardware then O.K. but somehow I doubt thats how this works, would be too work intensive and sloppy - error prone.